“Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.”
– George Eliot
“I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.”
– George Eliot
“Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.”
– George Eliot
“Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.”
– George Eliot
“There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.”
– George Eliot
“Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.”
– George Eliot
“Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.”
– George Eliot
“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”
– George Eliot
“There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.”
– George Eliot
“I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.”
– George Eliot
“You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.”
– George Eliot
“Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.”
– George Eliot
“The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.”
– George Eliot
“Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one’s self to do without it.”
– George Eliot
“A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.”
– George Eliot
“The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.”
– George Eliot
“Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.”
– George Eliot
“Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.”
– George Eliot
“When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.”
– George Eliot
“There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.”
– George Eliot
“No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.”
– George Eliot
“When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.”
– George Eliot
“A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.”
– George Eliot
“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.”
– George Eliot
“There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.”
– George Eliot
“Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.”
– George Eliot
“It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.”
– George Eliot
“We hand folks over to God’s mercy, and show none ourselves.”
– George Eliot
“The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.”
– George Eliot
“I’m not denyin’ the women are foolish. God Almighty made ’em to match the men.”
– George Eliot